


I/O

by armethaumaturgy, dezimaton



Category: Elsword (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-06 11:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17344115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armethaumaturgy/pseuds/armethaumaturgy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/dezimaton/pseuds/dezimaton
Summary: What happens after death? Is there a heaven or a hell? Is there such thing as death at all?Lab Experiment!Diabolic Esper





	1. Chapter 1

A pool of black spilled across the floor, hungrily snatching up unmarred tile. Just out of the corner of his vision, his mangled arm lay sprawled at the edge of the puddle. Esper narrowed his eyes, willing the limb to move, wiggle the fingers, any indication that he was still there, that this was real, but nothing happened. 

The appendage remained still, and suddenly seemed too small, too far from him, distant. And then it hit him that it wasn’t connected to him any longer, a sting of pain blooming from what was probably an empty shoulder socket. He didn’t have the energy to confirm, though.

 

Glancing up, Esper allowed his eyes to refocus on the two identical figures before him, details sharpening from once blurry silhouettes. The men were clothed in black and red armor, two jointed horns protruding from their flowing white hair. Recognition flickered in Esper’s eyes. It was Ara’s brother. Well, at least they looked like her brother.

 

The two were just like the real deal, perfect copies of the demon commander right down to the sheen of his sword and every last strand of hair. The only thing that gave them away was their distant gaze and the unnatural cyan glow that permeated the place. Their eyes held no light, themselves empty vessels that mimicked the true Ran’s actions, but nothing more. 

 

The two puppet Rans stared down at his broken body, neither moving nor attacking. Their work was complete. The room, once lit from seemingly everywhere and nowhere, dimmed until only a ring of light remained around him. Dark tendrils swarmed the edges, squirming inwards, hungry for space.

 

Esper let out a soft chuckle. He had fucked up, hadn’t he?

 

The time traveler didn’t get to ponder further because the remaining world shattered into shards, darkness eating up what shards of light were left.

 

Everything returned to empty, pitch-black void.

* * *

 

He was roused by a feeling of warmth on his skin. The sensation only touched upon his face, but it was enough, comforting like the sun’s rays on a clear day. Esper opened his eyes expecting light, though the sight that unfolded before him anything but. The room was dim, lit by a single lantern on the wall opposite and filled with equipment. Ominous shadows cast off sharp mechanical contraptions scraped across the walls and floor. Though the place was clean, the floor spotless and machines lined up in peak condition, Esper couldn’t suppress the shiver that spread through his body. 

 

Something was wrong, but he felt too tired to find the cause. Esper turned his head to look around. The space truly was filled with nothing but equipment. There wasn’t a soul in sight. His eyes wandered from a lone shelf of books on one side to the heavy metal door opposite, settling on a row of tanks and pneumatics that lined the wall. 

 

Staring ahead absently, it finally became apparent to him that the world was a muddy green. Esper blinked once. He blinked twice. He gently shook his head, but still the haze surrounded him. Perhaps it was meant to be like that. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. 

 

Esper felt heavy, still too sleepy to do anything. As if to affirm, a voice not unlike his own whispered “rest.” He couldn’t recognize the speaker nor discern where it came from, but its tone was familiar and the single word filled his entire body with warmth. He felt bad for not remembering, but it put him at ease nevertheless. Esper closed his already narrowing eyes and allowed himself to pass back into sleep.

* * *

 

The next time he woke, he was not alone. A familiar masked man cloaked in black stood before him. Without thinking, Esper mumbled a name. 

 

“Glave.”

 

A jet of bubbles left his mouth along with the word, tickling his nose on their way up. Bubbles? Confused, Esper breathed in deeply and exhaled to confirm. Once again a fresh stream of bubbles filled his vision. He wasn’t imagining them. 

 

Esper glanced back to Glave, who was still observing him. He pursed his lips and tried to call out to the time space administrator, but all that came out were warbled notes and more bubbles. He tried to vocalize again, this time louder with more force from his lungs, but his efforts only earned him larger bubbles. Esper felt his heart rate increase. He couldn’t speak. 

 

Glave had started to turn away towards the door. He didn’t have much time to catch the man’s attention. In desperation, Esper reached out to grab his shoulder, but his hands quickly met with an invisible wall. The blackened fingers that came into his field of vision obeyed him, but they couldn’t be his hands, could they? Esper frantically turned them around before him. The twitching fingers and nails had become a deep black, the contamination fading further up his arm. The hands were his. Panic spread like fire through his body. He couldn’t stop the garbled whine from escaping his lips or his increasingly ragged gulps of fluid. “No No No No NO NONONONO,” his mind raced. Esper thrashed around to look at the rest of his body, muddying up his sight with the cloud of bubbles. He could feel something foreign protruding from his back, could see the ugly black that his feet had been stained as well. “This couldn’t be real,” he thought, clawing at the curved walls all around him. Suddenly everything made sense. He wasn’t in a green room. He was in a glass tube filled with green liquid, like some messed up science experiment. 

 

By the time he looked back, Glave was gone. 

 

Overwhelmed, Esper fell limp in the tube of fluid. He drifted downward until something tugged up on his back. Reaching back with his hands his fingers found four ridged tubes attached seamlessly to his shoulder plates. They were flexible to allow movement in the small space, but attached to the metal plate above him and too short to allow free movement.

 

He thrashed about to wrench himself free of the tubes. His fists pounded at the glass walls of the enclosure. His lungs burned as he tried to force the liquid from him in a silent scream. Everything was so wrong and he had to get out, but nothing gave away. The next thing he knew, there were tears rolling from his eyes. The dark oil slid off his face and dripped to the bottom of the tank, falling through the grates. If anything was the same, at least his insides were this the same fucked up tar that he remembered. He almost laughed at the notion: comfort from seeing his own disgustingly dark fluids. What a joke.

 

The wave of exhaustion that came was like a blessing, darkness giving him respite from the ugly reality. He’d deal with it when he had to. And with that, drifted off into sleep.


	2. A Breath of Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esper breaks shit and makes a mess. Glave is there.
> 
> Lab Experiment!Diabolic Esper

Shards of glass crunch under his weight as he peels himself off the wet cement floor. The slanted floor and blackened hands before him are blurry and his entire body feels way too heavy, his entire body buzzing with strain- or is it pain? The deformed science experiment can’t tell. 

 

Esper blinks away the haze, ready to stand when his body is wracked with a violent coughing fit. His lungs feel like they’re on fire as mouthfuls of translucent green slime spill out of him onto the floor. Having been floating in a tank for longer than he could remember, he’d forgotten that what he’d been breathing wasn’t air. 

 

He spits out increasingly darker fluid, a light green with dark splotches transition to deep black. The remainder oozes down his chin and drips onto the floor, the stickier parts creating a fine strand connected to the floor. Esper heaves dryly before his body calms.

 

His throat and lungs feel raw, but Esper shakily takes in a deep breath that fills his newly freed lungs to the fullest, enjoying the familiar sensation of breathing air once again. It feels wonderful. The brisk laboratory air is a joy, like ice on an open wound. 

 

Suddenly laughter fills the room, his laughter. It’s dissonant and broken, echoing off of the various machines and glass tubes in the room. He’d done it, he’d gotten out of that godforsaken glass enclosure. It certainly wasn’t easy, having taken hours of clawing and ramming himself against the walls, but it was worth it.

 

Esper brushes a couple specks of glass off of the gash across his stomach, some of the greyish black organs inside peeking through the gap. The area buzzes at the touch, but isn’t as painful as he’d imagined it would be. He’s still able to walk with it, so in the end it’s a small price to pay for freedom.

 

Using the adjacent wall of tubes for support, Esper stumbles forwards. His legs feel like jelly. They’re just barely strong enough to keep him standing. He must’ve been asleep for a long while for them to be so weak. Everything is going fine until it feels like the floor’s been pulled out beneath him and Esper’s head meets hard concrete with a loud thud. 

 

He groans. His back was still attached to the glass enclosure by three rather sturdy tubes. The lines are pulled taught between him and the roof of the cell. In a fit of pure rage, Esper yanks on them with all his strength. He doesn’t expect them to come out, since he’s never had that kind of strength, but they do. 

 

All three tubes snap off of their sockets, ends fizzling with electric sparks. 

 

Esper hums with interest, making a mental note to investigate more later, and continues to make his way to the iron door to the laboratory. His clawed fingers grip the cold metal handle as firm he can and he takes a deep breath, praying to himself that the door be unlocked.

 

Eyes closed, he pushes down. The handle makes heavy grinding noises as it turns downwards and with a loud thunk, the door opens. A sigh of relief leaves his lips, although the scene before him is less than relieving. Outside the room there is nothing but inky darkness. The hall is pitch black and the air filled with moisture. It smells musty, like something of age, and with soft light from the laboratory behind him, he can barely make out the clean concrete floor transitioning into dirty stone tile. 

 

The visage is less than welcoming, but not wanting to wait until somebody or something catches him outside of the lab, he steps out into the abyss with firm steps. There’s the distinct glimmer of metal in the distance, but besides that no indication that there is anything but darkness. Esper follows the wall with one clawed hand, leaving a thin coating of green slime wherever he touches. He isn’t doing it on purpose, his body seems to be dripping with it by itself, but it’s admittedly kind of useful for keeping track where he has been. 

 

Cold stone walls fall away to porous metal frames, his fingers dancing from cylindrical bar to bar over the gaps. There is open space beyond the bars, but the mesh is fine enough to keep him from slipping in. Even without his sight, the mangled science experiment knows. These are prison cells.

 

A shiver runs up his spine. Why were there prison cells in this lightless room, along with the laboratory too? His imagination can guess, but none of the ideas are pretty. He only continues onwards in the darkness past countless cells until it appears as though he’s made it into an open area. Or at least, he thinks it’s an open chamber. The area is still dark, too dim to make out any objects or details, though from the way the wet slaps of his feet against the stone floor echo against the walls, he can guess that this room is larger than the area past.

 

Before he can ponder further, the sound of a door creaking open echos through the space. A source of light appears in the distance, which he presumes to be the exit, but something is coming. He can hear the soft footsteps down hollow wooden stairs in the distance. Esper doesn’t know what it is, but the chances of it being friendly are low so he keeps himself low to the ground as he crawls towards the shining beacon of hope. A desk-shaped silhouette looms before him and he eagerly ducks behind it. He waits with bated breath as the footsteps draw nearer and nearer, hoping the danger will pass by him unaware. They get so close by that the footsteps sound like thunder in his oversensitive ears, heartbeat racing. He holds his breath. 

 

Without warning, light floods the room.

 

The ‘desk’ turns out to be an operating table of some sort with restraints and glistening silver equipment at one side. At a loss for what to do, Esper huddles his knees tight, suddenly feeling very exposed, and not because he isn’t wearing any clothing. Every part of his distorted body is in plain sight from the revealing light: the blackened claws that were his hands and feet and the greyish taint that had settled in every fiber of his being. It’s disgusting and his stomach does a flip at the sight.

 

A husky laugh is all the warning he gets before a figure cloaked in black materializes before him. The single eye peeking through his mask gazes at him with interest as its owner inquires, “What are you doing?” Glave’s voice is toneless as always and the syllables of his words smooth like butter. 

 

Esper hisses in response. He feels some inhuman undertones manifest in his voice, dissonant rumbling and an artificial note layered onto his usual voice. It shocks him, since no person should ever sound like that, but he doesn’t let on how unnerved he is because Glave is here and he definitely can’t show any sign of weakness in front of the administrator. He spits, “I’m getting out of here. What are YOU doing here?” 

 

The man chuckles and straightens his back, returning to a relaxed standing position, opening a palm to chuck two blue dice that appear from nowhere. He answers without emotion, “This is my house, I own this place.”

 

Uncurling from his tight huddle, Esper looks up at the administrator with narrowed eyes. “Then- You did this? You put me into that glass tank?”

 

“I did,” the cloaked man answers. 

 

“Why?” Esper asks.

 

Glave’s mask is unreadable, but the slight glint of his eye doesn’t escape esper’s notice. He seems to be enjoying this. After a long silence the time space administrator speaks again, “You died.”

 

Esper’s eyes open in shock. _What?_ He is right here, alive and very clearly not dead. How is he dead? 

 

Noting his confusion, the time space administrator continues, “You _failed_ my challenge and were bleeding out.”

 

Esper’s head tilts down in defeat. That much he did remember. _So it wasn’t a dream._ He bolts upright. “Then what am I doing here? How am I still… moving?”

 

Glave’s posture softens ever so slightly. “I’ve grown quite fond of you, so I decided to preserve you for my collection.”

 

“Collection?” Esper furrows his eyebrows. This is too much too fast. His mind reels from the realization that he’s… dead- and being kept like a trophy. He wasn’t a trophy? He was a living thing? 

 

“Yes, my collection.” Glave confirms calmly. “Your existence is unique; the original child that I guided long ago. There are others Adds like you, but they’re just copies, echoes in space time. They aren’t _you_.”

 

Understanding dawns upon Esper’s features and he whispers under his breath, “But I don’t want to stay here.” He turns to Glave again and demands, “Where are my dynamos?”

 

The masked man doesn’t answer, but simply looks down at Esper with his single eye. If his face was visible right now, the administrator would most definitely have a wide smile across his face. Surprising for a man who showed little emotion towards everything. 

 

His answer is simple, “don’t expect to see them.” And in a lower, more threatening voice he whispers, “you belong to me now.”

 

Esper doesn’t get a moment more to think about it.

**Author's Note:**

> Naming conventions: (Esper/Time Traveler)
> 
> Author’s Note: a collaboration with eso, based on this [image](http://dezimaton.tumblr.com/post/127681862035/)


End file.
